At present, network technologies are developing rapidly, and demands of high bandwidth to home and enterprise cloud services see a remarkable increase. As the most convenient access mode for high bandwidth access, local area network (LAN) access is applying for a larger and larger proportion. In addition, the future makes sufficient room for enterprise and building access by applying LAN access.
Network devices consume a large amount of electric power, and enterprise users have little demands on the network during off-work hours. To be specific, the devices may be in the idle state for ⅔ of each day, thereby causing a waste of power. To solve this technical problem, the prior art proposes the concept of energy-efficient Ethernet. The implementation requirements of the energy-efficient Ethernet are stipulated in the IEEE 802.3az standard. The IEEE 802.3az standard is the first technical standard targeting at dynamic energy saving, defines related technical parameter requirements to ensure that after a physical layer (PHY) chip transmits data, the two parties involved in data transmission negotiate to automatically enter a low power consumption mode; and when data comes, the two parties are fast woken up to enter a normal working state. This standard greatly improves dynamic energy-saving performance when the PHY chip has a service link.
However, the existing energy-efficient Ethernet technology only solves the problem of energy saving of the PHY chip. The data switching device in the Ethernet is still challenged by the phenomenon that the device operates at high power consumption because an upper layer logic component fails to automatically enter the low power consumption state. Therefore, how to enable the network device to automatically work in the low power consumption mode is a challenge to highly intelligent network devices.